Thursday, January 12, 2012

Tim Burton Talks Dark Shadows Post Production

MTV's Movie Blog caught up with director Tim Burton to get an update of how post production work is progressing on the Dark Shadows feature film. "We're editing and doing effects," he explains. "It's not an effects-heavy picture, but it's still got stuff in there."

As in previous interviews, Burton again spoke of the challenge of capturing the right mood for the story: "Dark Shadows... was a very hermetically sealed world. It's mainly the internal family melodrama. You get a little bit of the sense of the world, but it's like Grey Gardens, where these people are in their own sort of world." Finding the right people was crucial: "It's not something that a lot of people necessarily know... I felt really lucky, because the cast is really good. People like Michelle [Pfeiffer] (Elizabeth Collins Stoddard) grew up watching it. Some of the cast knew about it. Some didn't, but they were all game for it — getting into the weird spirit of what Dark Shadows was."

Speaking about the original show, Burton said: "It has a weird sense of heightened melodrama... It had a weird seriousness, but it was funny in a way that wasn't really funny. We just had to feel our way through it to find the tone. We didn't do any real rehearsals, because the cast all came in at different times." The film's cast shot proved to be an important bonding exercise for the actors: "There was an old photo of the [original] cast which I always remembered... Before shooting, we got the whole cast together to take a similar shot so everyone could see each other and get that vibe. That helped set the tone more than anything."

And in other Dark Shadows movie news, the new issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine includes the film in its preview of 2012's cinema and features a new production still of Johnny Depp as Barnabas alongside co-star Michelle Pfeiffer.